"That's a pretty small footprint," she says, adding that consumers could take a long time to trade up to more powerful handsets.

The small size of the Beatnik files means that game makers have much more freedom to use sounds and music at key moments in the game.

Mr Segerstrale says sorting out audio for games was much easier than almost every other aspect of producing a playable title for handsets.

Old style sounds

He says a typical game for a mobile phone would have to be written in six languages, conform to more than 83 different operator specifications and work on many different sorts of phones.

Dedicated game phones are starting to appear

Often, he says, they end up with hundreds of versions of games.

The standardised audio system means that, instead of just having sounds when aliens are killed, says Mr Segerstrale, sounds can be associated with many more events.

It makes it possible to make theme tunes for separate game screens and certain characters in the game can have their own signature tune.

Jan Weber, head of mobile games review site Midlet Review, says game sounds had come a long way.

"Having started with beep sounds and music mobile gamers are now able to listen to nice music as well as to impressive sound effects."

He likens phone music now to the standard that gamers got with the Amiga and the Commodore 64.

But, he says, this is a big improvement on the days when he began reviewing games for phones such as the Siemens AL45i which provided only a few beeps for the Bricks, Worm and i-Skiing games it had onboard.

The future, says Mr Copp, will involve the ability to sample and include real world sounds for screeching tyres in driving games or gunshots in shooters.